Sorry for LLM flavor in the article. It's valid criticism and I will rewrite it when I get the chance. I just wanted to share the story and I didn't have time to write it completely from scratch, plus I'm not that great of a writer. I thought filtering my thoughts through LLM editor would eliminate the distraction of my poor writing abilities, which for most people I think it worked. For others, it created another distraction, ragebait in fact, which was not my iuntention. So between working 80 hours a week at the prompt factory and raising two kids I will find some time to de-ragebaitify the article, although it seems to have unintentionally propelled it to the front page, for which I am admittedly thankful for.
I'm sorry that the focus on whether this article was written by an LLM or not, rather than the fact that you spent years on a labor of love. It's an excellent effort and I don't care whether the article about it was written by an LLM or not, I enjoyed it.
You don't need to rewrite anything, unless, I guess, you already have. The text that's up there now is just fine. Long, yes, but then it's a long story, and it makes for an enjoyable read.
There's a crowd of ludds around here who (paraphrasing another Churchill besides the one you wrote about) won't change their minds about AI and can't change the subject. One thing you can be certain of is that even if you rewrite the text to sound more human, they still aren't going to buy the game. Ignore them, and keep doing what you've been doing!
It's an inspirational true story and well-written. Then notice if the writing style feels familiar. The short sentences. It becomes the visual equivalent of these realistic AI photos, where it looks mostly right, but some feels a little off in the same way that something else you read recently felt a little off.
I'm glad I read the Brownie Mary Story and this Wall Street Raider story as well, but I also don't look forward to a future flooded with content that's "in the style of a professional writer" without some of the details and authentic voice that helps writing really connect.
There certainly are arenas where LLM writing provokes adverse reactions, and in general I think people are becoming less tolerant of it.
Personally, I often find the smell of AI annoying, but I don't mind the way you used it in this article, and after all, there are some good use cases for AI writing.
I assume it will become easier and commonplace to configure LLMs to produce 'de-ragebatified' writing styles.
Pretty soon I reckon we'll be so inundated with AI content in all media that it simply won't be possible or rational to be offended by it, it will just become our new reality, our new world.
I would say you shouldn't apologize, that's what ai tools are for, to help us humans. Instead of rewriting manually, try a specialized for writing tool such as bookswriter.xyz or sudowrite
It's definitely a time/energy vs quality tradeoff. You say you're not that great of a writer, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that. But I can tell that your natural narration style is much higher quality and more enjoyable to read than what an LLM can generate (even if it's trying to copy your personal style).
It's a tough tradeoff for me both as a consumer and as a do-er. I am very sensitive to LLM-isms. Like many other millennials, (even if perhaps not quite most) I grew up online from a young age when text was the only viable communication medium, so I learned to notice incredibly small nuances of how someone writes and use those nuances to infer/personify the narrator. LLM's not only stick out like a sore thumb, their language actually "jams up" my 'text-personifier' neurological circuits. It's like my brain is saying "WTF? Why can't I synthesize any reasonable model of the person who wrote this?" the entire time, even if I know it's AI. That's frustrating, exhausting, and alienating.
So yeah, as I said: It's a tough tradeoff for me both as a consumer and as a do-er. I'm glad you used an LLM to do the write-up so that it shows up here and I can enjoy the work you did. I often use LLM's to write documentation at my startup for both my own reference and for my cofounders. I don't like it, but it's better than not doing it, and sometimes it's better to spend that time on other things, especially when the thing I'm documenting is subject to change very shortly.
I think the sweet spot, for me, is this:
If you're going to write it with an LLM, do so unapologetically. Put a disclaimer at the top. Understand that what you are delivering to your audience is not the LLM output, but whatever output was generated from your own input (work, vision, ingenuity, perseverance). Keep the LLM generated content concise, sharing only the necessary narrative and information to give consumers the context they need to understand whatever the actual work product is. The less slop I have to struggle through, the better - LLM's are absolutely awful at narration. And then make it easy to explore your actual work product!
I'm not sure my strategy might cause posts to never reach the front-page. I hope that our audiences can understand that this might be the best compromise and come to accept it in some cases. I will continue to point out when HN posts show strong signs of being LLM generated (as judged by my own tuned sense of nuance, empathy, and theory of mind...not whether they use em-dashes) but the intent isn't to tell people "this isn't worth reading". The intent of disclosing LLM generation is to inform people that the best way to consume the content is to switch to their personal "I'm reading LLM generated content"-mode and experience it through that lens.
Interestingly, my startup seems to have taken a somewhat similar strategy with vibe-coding. We're all aware that vibe-generated codebases are objectively worse, harder to read, and harder to maintain than our best hand-written code. It tends to fail on dumb edge cases and just doesn't have the "vision" that hand-written code would, because it glosses over decisions that we'd have paused and thought about for awhile before adjusting our vision and proceeding. But doing the initial proof-of-concept or prototype with LLM's greatly speeds up the period of exploration where we go "We're pretty sure there's a good a way to do this, and we're pretty sure we know what that way is, but there's a few unknowns that need to be proven". With hand-coding, those "unknowns" can take a long time to work through. With vibe-coding, we can try several different strategies, learn about the reality of implementing those strategies, and then go back and hand-write something more maintainable from scratch once we're pretty sure we've landed on the approach that we judge will be "stable". The timeline/priority for converting vibe-code to hand-code depends on how long we expect that code to last, how central it is to the system, and how important it is for humans to be able to debug, maintain, and interface with it.
This is such a well written story, and congratulations Ben, it sounds like it's been a lot of hard but ultimately successful work!
I know you'll deservedly get a lot of credit for all your work in remastering the game, but you should also get credit for how you've woven this narrative together, it's a lovely read. Thank you for taking the time to write it up, and good luck with the Steam release, and whatever project you take on next! :)
Claude actually! Yeah the content editing was heavily LLM assisted as I'm a terrible writer and I wanted the read to be enjoyable. So I compiled all the research and worked with Claude to build the article. I then attempted to go through with a fine tooth comb and write it in my own words. That is one particular sentence I missed with a highly recognizable LLM pattern which I will fix. I simply also don't have time to really market the game, I care more about the quality of the software. I know if the software is great then it will be successful. But I wanted to share the story in a compelling way. Apologies if it was distracting!
Marketing copy has been using this rethorical artifact for decades, as well as journalism with some success, it is like an analogy, but pruned down in meanin by the opposition. It is impactful, and probably got high marks with the humans doing RHLF, that I suppose, came mostly from journalism and marketing schools.
I think it comes from the RLHF. If you haven't interacted with LLMs enough to get turned off by it, I think that kind of speech is seen as powerful and confident.
RLHF = Right Left Hand Foot. It's a technique in Bavarian interpretative folk dance where you jump around, artfully hitting the soles of your feet with your hands in order to court women who are busy carrying unbelievable numbers of beer Steins into the mountains.
That's what came to mind when I saw the abbreviation. Then I looked it up:
It is a staple of marketing and journalism writing. And the guys doing the HF on it most probably came from this exact background: marketing and journalism.
Professionally typeset books. Designers have been typing it—and the other dashes—manually using modifiers+hyphen on Mac since 1984. You can type them—plus the bullet character—today on iOS by doing a long press on the hyphen key.
I’m not talking about the em-dash, which is not a great indicator IMO but the horrible overuse of binary oppositions with a kind of false surprise, e.g.:
The problem was not em-dashes — but binary opposition!
That sort of thing.
It is a much clearer marker of llm use than the em-dash. The sad thing is when searching for info on this the most convincing reply in search was generated by an LLM, which went on at length about why LLMs do this as some sort of consequence of their internal structure. I have absolutely no idea if that’s true — it really sounds a bit trite and exactly the kind of thing LLMs would confidently assert with no basis. I would want to hear from someone working in LLMs, but their blogs are probably all generated by an LLM nowadays. So this conundrum is a good example of a question where LLMs actively work against clear resolution.
This is in my view the most insidious damage word generators are inflicting on our culture — we can no longer assume most writing is honest or well-meaning because amoral LLMs fundamentally are not wired to make that distinction of true and untrue or right and wrong (unlike most humans) and many people will use and trust what they generate without question, polluting the online space and training data until everything is just a morass of half-known facts sprinkled with generated falsehoods that are repeated so often they seem true.
How do we check sources when the sources themselves were generated by LLMs?
My personal feel (completely subjective) is that during RLHF humans are incredibly sensitive to this pattern, especially when talking about personal or emotional issues. Any reply in the form of "it's not you, it's them" is such a dopamine hit that the LLMs started applying it for everything else.
The em-dash meme, if it's actually a thing, I find really annoying. That's the style in a lot of places and for a lot of people with or without spaces on either side. It was house style a a few different places I worked over about 25 years. More broadly, I assume LLMs are training on how a lot of people actually write. I'm not changing my writing style because some people will flag it as LLM-generated <shrug>.
Whatever it is that caused "It's not X, It's Y", it's more recent than LLMs as a whole.
As far as I remember, neither GPT3.5, GPT4, nor Claude Instant did it. I think Gemini was the first to really do it, and then out of nowhere, everybody was doing it.
Setting aside the style, I think you asked for more output — 5,000 words — than your prompt supports, so the model repeated the same details over and over to stretch out the story after it hits the major notes.
Obvious tells are repetitive numeric details: the number of lines of code (mentioned six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.
I did that on purpose, I thought it needed to be reiterated. See, you're blaming the AI but that was me. I did not specify a word count. Maybe I should have let the AI write the whole thing? Like I said I am not a great writer, especially content editing. Even with AI I couldn't make everyone happy. Oh well.
It has a particular style I’ve seen lately using more short confident sentences as professional writers do. But it lacks the professional writer’s sense of when to add an anecdote and when to leave out a detail. And it is this juxtaposition that gives it a distinctive LLM feel of being written in the style of a professional writer, yet something is off.
Please don't feel the need to be defensive about this. People are reacting in a predictable way to a shift in how effort is perceived.
Where one formerly could use a certain way of writing as a heuristic for effort put into content they are spending time ingesting, now that heuristic is meaningless and a new one must replace it.
At this point some people have decided 'has markers of AI writing' is the heuristic to match 'no/low effort' on, and are trying to use shame in order to start a system of self-policing against it. Unfortunately that isn't going to work, because
1. the heuristic is flawed
2. most people are going to end up using AI tools for writing, since writing well is difficult
I don't agree that it's flawed. There's so much to gain by writing your own words. It's something to practice and after a while, it's even fun to be able to express something the way you intended. Even today I do my own writeups and articles manually. I want the text to come from me, to show how I'd put it, even if I have a typo here and there. I feel like it's worth it to keep your own personality instead of having AI do it for you - or even edit for you. Even if you think your writing suck, it's still your voice and it's just more interesting for me to read an actual human being.
I agree honestly. I just wanted to get the story out and share it and I'm swamped IRL. But I'm going to go back and clean it up when I get the chance. I do appreciate the constructive feedback from everyone and I will do better.
It’d be an interesting exercise to just write it again yourself without referring to the LLM article then compare the two to see which bits of each are better. Yours would be shorter, but perhaps better and more honest?
Just wanted to say don't worry about it too much. I do advocate for writing because I like it and I feel it rewards me. But you made a decision to do it a certain way and that's fine. Don't let people tear you down for this.
I don't use AI for my writing and I agree with you. I meant that it is bad heuristic because people often do put a lot of effort into posts with AI writing styles in them, so it is not accurate due to a large amount of false positives. If one performs a test that is wrong a significant percentage of the time then it will be eventually abandoned.
The heuristic isn't going away because we have limited time. Let's say you can clock AI in the first paragraph.
There are lots of places like Linkedin where people write slop articles saying basically nothing insightful, and AI allows them to write at Isaac Asimov or Brandon Sanderson type speeds. AI slop has no cost, so it will always outweigh insightful AI-assisted writing without careful curation. You will have read thousands of articles that begin in AI-evident formats that don't end in anything good.
That will always poison the well of somebody at the end of that first paragraph. They will consider the source, think "What are the odds this is more slop", and often click out.
People who I know don't speak English natively get a pass from me because no amount of effort in the short term is going to substitute for fluency, but everybody else... less so.
I honestly get it. I wouldn't have made that comment but I get why it was made. It tells me I need to go back and put some more effort into it and clean it up. You know, in-between working 80 hours a week at the prompt factory and working on the actual game... Without Claude there would be no story to read. I pay Anthropic $200/mo and Claude is a robot. I don't think anyone shed a tear that I didn't put "coauthored by Claude" at the bottom.
It has nothing to do with missing "coauthored by Claude"
The problem is you're wasting other people's time, with long and low quality writing.
One of the points of writing your own words is to gather your own thoughts. The value of writing skills is to organize the delivery. But the first point is that they are your thoughts.
I think your replies are seriously missing the criticism.
Most people enjoyed it. It is the same as the game. Most people like the remaster direction, a subgroup vehemently dislike specific design decisions and they don't always overlap. The more people that learn about the game the volume of feedback goes up and so does the volume of negative feedback. Just telling you feel my perspective, take it when a grain of salt. So you learn to take negatively, especially emotionally charged negativity, with a grain of salt. And you have a compulsion to ignore it. But I'm a very self aware person and I try to see the other side. I may not understand it, I may not agree, but I try to listen and understand. But to say I blanket missing the criticism is a flippant remark in my opinion. I'm not an idiot... It's easy to tell AI was involved and it turned many people off. But they also crap on the stuff I wrote from scratch. So is it AI or just that I suck at writing? It was just to share the story. I reread it multiple times and I enjoy the story even knowing it like the back is my hand. I lived it. I write stuff for me. I remastered the game for me and to share with like minded people. Honestly, the article being anti-AI rage bait is a low pass filter for people who could have said anything, and instead, they chose to NIT the article. But I try to be open minded and do better, but I am only human, not an AI, I have emotions and opinions. I'm sure most of those opinions are flawed. But I'm not mad at any of the criticism and I appreciate it.
Writing is not about writing. Admittedly, that is a trick sentence [what does it mean??] and it exists because I'm trying to get you to re-evaluate my next words. And, I am doing this because I think you are missing the point.
Writing is about organizing your thoughts. You cannot have someone else organize your thoughts. Once you approach writing as a thought excercise, and not an output excercise, then there is a world of nuance and writing is more than just organizing your thoughts.
Further, you have allegedly spent 3 years on this. I know you're busy. That said, you can certainly spend 3 days on writing if you spent 3 years working on this.
Please don't double down on acting like everyone is just a hater. There is more depth to the criticism than I think is being acknowledged.
P.s, if you feel "blocked" writing and think of it as just about output, try this:
(0) Ask yourself what you want to convey, why; to whom.
(1) Write without inhibition
(2) Edit, cut, delete. Refer to (0); look at what seems higher word count in proportion to its value.
There are other tips to editing and writing. This is one rough off the cuff formula that I think tracks & may benefit you, especially since you seem to see yourself as a worse writer than you may actually be.
There's no reason to be so nasty. The fact that it's currently on the top 5 posts on HN means you're dead wrong, he's not wasting anyone's time.
TBH I found it one of the most interesting and engaging articles I've seen on HN in a long time. The writing itself is not great, but the story is great.
I’d love to read more about how the original code looks like - examples of the parts that would be so difficult to transpile / understand and so on. And perhaps an overview of the game’s architecture? It surely is a unique piece of code due to the complexity, and I’m sure there are many interesting parts and algorithms there.
Speaking of LLMs, I recently used Claude Code on my own old codebase to do such a writeup, and it ended up a very nice read for myself too - Claude managed to explain some parts of what I built better than I did :D
I don't, because I stopped reading after I recognized LLM output. You could basically take all the comments you wrote in this thread verbatim and it would still be better, even if there are some grammar errors here or there. Please give yourself more credit.
I did not read it because the prose was insipid. Maybe the project is interesting, but I won't know because I'm not going to read an infomercial. You must understand that this stuff is not to everyone's taste.
So if something is written by an LLM it makes it an infomercial?
Also, what are you comparing this post to? Because you should compare it to the author’s own writing and according to the author, his writing is not that good.
Move along then? Anecdotal datapoint but all the anti LLM comments in here are a lot of less than a year old accounts.
If you don’t like something simply move along. Constructive criticism is great but the volume of overly negative and honestly nasty replies like yours are not in the spirit of HN.
Good, I will continue to voice it. Unfortunately it takes me several thousand times longer to complain about AI slop polluting the bulletin than it does to populate the bulletin with AI slop, which is the actual nastiness going on here.
Nope the only nastiness is how critical mean you are in your replies. All it takes is a quick hey I appreciate the article but not the use of a LLM to write it. None of the other words you have used are in the spirit here. Move along.
Can we stop with this? The world has changed, LLMs exist, people use them, and "omg LLMs" is a very tired trope now. If you didn't like the article, you can critique it, but "you used a tool I don't like" is just boring.
Why should I spend more time reading something than the person spent writing it? The fact is that generating large amounts of text without care or effort has become very easy, so it makes perfect sense to discard writing with LLM signatures.
> Why should I spend more time reading something than the person spent writing it?
The labor theory of value doesn't work in economics and it also doesn't work in literary criticism. You should spend time reading something if reading it is valuable. You shouldn't if it isn't.
The trouble is it's impossible to magically know in advance if something is worth reading. You have to use secondary information to guess. Until recently "it appears that the author put effort into writing it" was a vaguely useful signal, but LLMs have ruined that.
Actually that's not even the only issue. Another reason people hate this is because it's inconsiderate - it's like people who leave voicemails or say "hi" in chat. They are not respecting my time.
Until recently, the only way to know whether the author put effort into writing the piece was to read it. Simply continue doing what you've always been doing.
That's simply not true. Before AI it took effort to write. Even rambly nonsense takes some effort, and even then rambly nonsense is usually obvious without having to read much.
AI changes things so that you can produce text that seem like it was written with care and effort very easily automatically. It requires significantly more effort from the reader to figure out that it is worthless.
I personally find LLM text exceptionally boring and tiresome to read. It is often incredibly voluminous and filed with trite phrasing that turns a one sentence idea into 3 paragraphs of pablum.
Yes, this has been inspired by a senior management figure in my company posting a clearly LLM assited 500 word slack message that could have been 2 lines.
"I find this article exceptionally boring and tiresome to read" is fine. "This article was generated by an LLM, and therefore it will be boring and tiresome" is just bias.
I and many others find it a useful warning. So I doubt people will stop noting it as part of a critique of things.
'You used a tool I don't like' is really missing the point.
'You generated text that is long and a bit boring and will probably include falsehoods.' is a more accurate description of why people pick up on this - the style is an indicator of using a tool that generates convincing garbage.
What I want is for THIS to stop. "Listen, no one wants to hear about your moral issues, just stfu."
Don't give up so easily. Let the discomfort in and try & figure out why people keep saying "omg LLMs" until you can hear what they are actually saying.
Congrats on such an achievement. The remake looks great, but those DOS screenshots have an undeniable charm. With such a large scale game, something I always find interesting is uncovering what types of quirks and bugs bubble underneath the surface in the original version. Did you come across anything obvious in your testing?
The reason I discovered options prices were wrong is because for fun I created an In-The-Money visualization graph for when you're doing advanced options spreads and I noticed that the graph was asymetrical and profitability and loss made no sense. So with the help of Claude we debugged the code and came up with a pricing strategy that was closer to Black-Scholes. And it really is because it takes into account industry volatility and such it was a fun side quest and Michael is happy with the result which I am very proud of! It really makes me confident that one day, long live the king but, he is in his 80s. Decades from now I will be able to survive on my own, I hope.
Options pricing was not correct, which MJ knew because he simply based it on lookup table using ratios of a spread on a random security in his brokerage account decades ago! I tried to implement Black-Scholes best I could, my one contribution to the engine thus far. MJ has patched several things such as runaway interest rates and commodity prices, too-easy crypto price movements. Typos here and there. Certain edge cases that only a highly skilled player would ever come across, which due to the Discord server brought those players out of the woodwork to battle harden the game and a place for them to report the things they always knew but never had the motivation to report. But for the most part the engine is pretty damn solid.
This was an interesting story, but implying this is some unique insight irked me a little - perhaps because it is LLM-flavoured text that hypes it too much, and makes it sound like some kind of major breakthrough? Keeping the original game as-is, underneath a modern port 'layer', is a pretty popular and common way to update things, you can see it being done in a bunch of modern remasters.
A technical question for you around the porting being a dead end:
I see from other replies that you now understand the code reasonably well and feel you can expand/extend it while keeping it in BASIC. However, I note you've also done project where you automatically ported Fortran to Lua - are you not interested in trying to do something similar for performance/maintainability reasons? Is there an advantage in keeping it in PowerBASIC?
I've wish listed the game, and look forward to playing it, it sounds like great fun - even the manual sounds like a good read.
I did exactly that originally. But here is the reality. Michael only knows BASIC and he has felt the agency to continue patching and working on the code, adding features even, since it is still BASIC. When others tried to port it to C++ be felt like he had no agency and wasn't motivated to help. So while he's still motivated to work on it, it needs to stay in a language he can work with. And thanks for wishlisting!!!
It seems to be a one-of-a-kind simulation product that could be used as part of actual financial/trading training. There's insane value here, giving the source code away for free is absolutely not a good strategy.
I think it is pretty unreasonable to call CP/M "primitive beyond belief". It was basically equivalent to MS-DOS in capability -- after all, MS-DOS was basically an unlicensed clone of CP/M for the 8086.
More in number, or as a percentage of people who use computers?
I’d believe the first one, but not the second. Even if you didn’t count the many people who only use completely closed systems like iOS, Chromebook, or the ordering kiosk at McDonalds in the denominator.
> after all, MS-DOS was basically an unlicensed clone of CP/M for the 8086.
Eh, not really. The file system was very different and these early operating systems were mostly a file system. The system calls were almost identical…
Good eye! I hope to go back and finish editing it. But it's better use of my time to work on the game itself. But hey, I did all the research at least which took me years so. I just wanted to share the story instead of listing bullet points. I have pretty bad ADHD so, I didn't wanted the article to be a rambling.
The vast, vast majority of people are never going to play the game. For most of us this write up is the closest we will ever get to the work you've done. Under that lens, the writeup is strangely more important than the work.
This is my favorite thing I’ve read on Hacker News, ever. Congratulations Ben and Michael, I’m so glad you both had the tenacity to make this happen. Well done.
Regarding "The Second Oldest Game Developer", there are also the authors of "Spacewar!": Steve Russell was born in 1937, meaning, he's either 89 or will be 89 this year. Dan Edwards must be around that age, as well.
Spacewar was ported to Plato from Control Data; I played a little, but I played a lottt of Avatar. There are a number of Plato games that probably have some older / early game developers. Out of curiosity I just looked up Avatar, Bruce Maggs coded it in ‘76 and went on to among other things be one of the Akamai founders. But he’s 20 years younger than Russell.
A few more candidates for the ranking: Peter Samson (of Expensive Planetarium fame, the background star simulation of Spacewar!, and known for his music on the PDP-1, also author of the TMRC Dictionary [0], still active with the CHM PDP-1 team) born in 1941, Ellen Kuhfeld (Minnesota Spacewar [1] for the CDC 3100 at the University of Minnesota, 1966-68) is also in her 80s.
It was originally a PDP-1 game. If you are talking about the PC remake by B. Seiler, it was only 9KB. There is no need to bother with a relocation table if it's under 64KB.
Reading between the lines, the game logic itself hasn’t been reverse engineered yet, so adding, changing, or fixing logic still means working with the original code that only Michael Jenkins understands to this day.
In any case: massive props to Ben. This feels like a strong foundation, and I’m excited to see him continue evolving the game.
It was never really reverse engineering as the source code was available to the developers (including Ben), and Michael even took the time to give meaningful names to variables, etc. I suppose the author meant to say it was hard to actually understand what's going on both in Power Basic and in the domain of knowledge because of the massive complexity of the game.
Tenuous relevance, but a different stock market game written in BASIC on the Apple II (well, I only had access to the Franklin Ace clone) was my initial motivation at age 10 or so to try programming. It was a pretty thrilling amount of power to a 10-year-old to be able to rename all the companies after my friends or whatever jokes I wanted, and next to alter the rules to get more money. It’s a good thing BASIC was everywhere in the 80s — so many books and computer manuals had enough information that it was easy to find a source to learn the (no pun intended) basics.
> The game he wanted to make required something that didn't exist yet: a personal computer.
> So Jenkins waited.
This part made me laugh out loud. It made me imagine Jenkins as a time traveller who had made a mistake and got stuck in the past, but knew that personal computers would be invented.
You should either bundle the DOS version with the game, or release it separately somewhere. If you broke the DOS frontend and don't want to get it working again, maybe release the last working DOS version?
Consider releasing on GOG. This game is great nostalgia bait, and if you release the DOS version, the GOG staff are quite experienced at building modern, cross-OS installers for DOS games and tuning DOSBox.
FWIW I never played this particular game but around the turn of the millenium I put probably over 100 hours in Trevor Chan's Capitalism games [1].
If you get the urge to try Capitalism again, you should take a look at Capitalism Lab [1]. It picks up from the original Capitalism series and adds a lot of UI enhancements / quality of life stuff as well as some new features and moddability.
I enjoyed the read. How did you tap into the legacy Power Basic engine? Was there a FFI or some kind of bridge you could hook into? And what languages were you using?
I built an FFI via event dispatching and shared memory pointers/matching structs. Imported the C++ UI layer as a DLL via Win32 LoadLibrary. The PB shares a big array for storing global pointers allowing them to read/write each other's memory. The C++ has an event queue and has DLL functions the PB can call to peek/pop the next event. It actually isn't that complicated, just took me forever to come up with the idea.
As for languages, PB, C++, and JavaScript (Electron/Preact). I chose a no-build UI framework so that it could be modded by players without installing any build tools, just edit the text files in the game folder, and it has been a very good decision.
Indeed very clever. I wonder if you framed this problem up with claude how it would “guide” you to solve this problem. Would be an interesting match up of ai vs human. Love the story!
The feat was done before Claude Agent which is why it was so challenging. Although I admit I am a heavy user now circa the past two weeks. We shall not discuss my Claude Code experience lest I have another mental breakdown at work and my employer has to send me home again. Let me put it this way. I have set up Claude dangerously skip permissions with Agent Teams, Fast Mode, and our automated e2e test suite I designed where it can see screenshots of every step and browser and API console logs. It is entirely hands off software development. I have had to think long and hard about my identity as a software engineer. So forgive me if for my passion project I don't let Claude do everything, lest I remember the decades I spent reading those textbooks on my shelf, and the fear that I will forget it all.
If I can't get a response from a publisher here soon, I will be setting an Early Access release date of 1-2 months from now to give me some time to build up more wishlists before I pull the trigger.
No, I had considered Microprose, Kitfox, Hooded Horse. I reached out to some but I should have been reaching out a year or two ago. I didn't think I would need one, I still don't think I NEED one... But would have been nice. But I just set a release date as a kick in the butt to get this thing shipped, which pretty much burns the boats of signing a publisher. I think it is better this way though. If it fails it fails. But Michael and I get to keep whatever proceeds are made and we get to do things our way at our pace. But there's other games such as Speculator that also need revamped. I kinda want Hackjack Games to be a remastering game studio, a land of misfit games of sorts. Maybe I'll be more open to having a publisher in the future.
Really cool article! The solution to wrap the engine in a modern UI was a good one. I would have fallen to the trap of trying to port the whole thing, like all the other companies did.
Out of curiosity, how are the things tested? Or is checking core-engine doing things right only up to the developer and their tribal knowledge?
Manual smoke testing and touching the original code as little as possible, for now. I am working on an automated testing solution although it will require a lot of backend changes in order to do create fixtures.
I admittedly only googled quickly but is there anywhere I can buy the original and the book still? I understand he had issues with the payment processor, and I can see free versions to download but I'd prefer to do it legitimately if possible
Join Discord there is a channel dedicated to instructions on contacting him. He no longer sells the game except mailing him a check. A completely unrelated factoid... He LOVES $30 Amazon gift cards...
I'm sure there is truth in original author saying tax code complexity as the core challenge. But that's not what makes this hard. That's domain complexity we all come up against it's accidental complexity that killed the ports.
The real problem is idiosyncratic and esoteric coding practices from a single self-taught accountant working in a language that didn't encourage good structure.
I can translate well-written code without understanding what it does functionally, so long as I understand what it's doing mechanically.
The original author seems to build in the assumption you're not going to translate my code you'll need to rewrite it from the the tax code!
I continue to advocate for the fact that Michael's code is not bad at all. There are some anti patterns in it for sure, what engineer hasn't fallen into those traps. The fact is Michael is an infinitely better programmer than many of the senior developers I've worked work in my career. I truly sing high praise to his software development capabilities, not just coding itself but building the product, delivering results, and getting it out the door, especially a simulator like this with no reference points, no formal training, no help? Sure it took him 40 years and it's in BASIC and uses gosub everywhere. But the damn thing works and for anyone who took the time to learn the language and structure as I did, you will see that it is actually very enjoyable codebase to work with.
the difference between gosub and if blocks calling a function is more academic than practical, you still have a main event loop sending your path of execution someplace based on something that happens.
I might not be a basic practitioner, but as someone who as written serious things in bash and powershell, I can see the allure.
2) the prose is very LLM-flavored, but for once I don’t mind. It’s obvious to me that this blog post only exists because an interesting, intelligent person used an LLM to lower the cost of extracting complex ideas from their brain.
3) the “Fits of Rationality” process sounds a lot like how coding agents work. They’re alive in the moment, then later all they have to work with is the written record of their previous sessions. The Herculean effort to re-implement the result foreshadows the vibe-coding repair industry.
What a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing! As a mechanical engineer with barely any knowledge or inclination towards coding and/or finance you persuaded me to look into the game.
This is very well written. I have fairly low interest in video games and rarely read gaming content, but read this all the way through. That’s an achievement in itself!
I figured the engineering crowd here would enjoy the technical journey and I am so grateful it got to front page so that I may talk about the technical side which I enjoy doing. I am not a hermit by nature and posting on HN really was a cry for someone to ask me a question about the backend. So I really appreciate all the technical questions gives me an opportunity to get into the weeds a bit.
To be able to write this well and this engagingly is a real talent. And it worked - I sent this to three friends who I always gently mock for playing games that are, effectively, spreadsheets. Two of them said it looks exactly like the sort of thing they will enjoy!
This story is super interesting and I think can teach us some valuable lessons about refactoring and the price of truly understanding the domain in which the code operates.
The accompanying article is also a pleasant reading with a nice bit of background, and I really liked the motivation behind "layering" on top instead of rewriting from scratch.
I referenced a LOT of articles and case studies on legacy rewrites and ports in that first year. It is definitely a challenge that even with LLM still exists and I am happy to add to the body of knowledge surrounding the subject.
Well that was a pretty cool story. Really enjoyed that it was sufficiently good for its time that so many people got into the field after enjoying playing it (or perhaps that it was enjoyable enough for so many destined for the field to use). And loved the bit where someone emails him and a few chats later off he sends the source code.
I loved this game. As soon as I saw the title I knew it would be Wall Street Raider. I play it via dosbox and for me the UI is part of the charm. I’d be interested in tinkering with the pricing simulation but from the article it seems like that’s almost impossible.
Not impossible but a lot of work. But with Custom Data API and Set Game State API you can do a lot of what you may wish you could do from modding the frontend. Not ideal but it goes from impossible to a possible!
I know it almost sounds crass, but you should consider letting an LLM take a crack at transpiling the code. Source to source translations are one of the most widely agreed upon strengths of LLMs.
I can tell you from reading the code in the 90s, no LLM will save you. It’s well written, but it’s not structured like modern programs. IIRC he invented his own trampoline system using goto that will leave you scratching your head for days, just trying to figure out how it works. An LLM might be able to guess, but it def isn’t going to one-shot it and that means you will need to be able to understand it as well.
I do think it is possible with the advent of Claude Agent to transpile the code. First I would refactor the trampoline system to be functional and unit test everything. Then I would use those tests to validate the transpilation. It's something that I would consider doing for a Wall Street Raider 2 to overhaul the engine and deliver massive improvements to the engine itself. I do want to do this to a certain extent to implement automated e2e testing. But I don't mind BASIC at all, prefer it actually, I just want automated testing set up. But a lot of this is beyond the scope of my goals for Early Access release.
My "learn options trading" environment, I realized after reading this, really needs a news feed to get a feel for what is happening in the virtual world of the test trading, so I added one today. Still very much playing around with it, the alpha is at https://trading.linsomnaic.com/
This is a wonderful project, and the post is a wonderful read!
Are there any plans to break out portions of the Basic engine to a modern language? It's frustrating that the heart of the game remains inscrutable. Surely Ward is tempted?
I understand the code now after working with it for so long. I even improved the options code to use Black-Scholes so I have a few tricks up my own sleeve. The reality is, now that I have mastered the codebase structure and BASIC... Why would I port it? I have plans on how to keep it in BASIC and make it cross platform e.g. web based.
Ben, thanks for working on this! I instantly flashed back to the mid to late 80s when I saw the screenshots; I’m certain I played this game as a pre-teen. Just let us know how we can buy it.
This is amazing! Having no knowledge of Basic, a.) what makes the rewrite "impossible"? b.) how do coding agents perform on the codebase? It might make for a neat benchmark similar to ARC
I gather the version of Basic is not Object-Oriented.
So the program most likely is flat: a bunch of global variables (and possibly memory addresses), and instructions ordered by line number, rather than functions or methods.
Apparently PowerBasic was the successor to Borland TurboBasic and complied to a native executable. So this wasn't an interpreted 'line number' Basic like our kiddie computers. It also probably had the Borland Windows GUI stuff.
(However it wouldn't surprise me if older 'line number' programs still mostly worked. iirc VB6 also supported this.)
No line numbers but you can use numbers as goto labels. It uses Dynamic Dialog Tools which is a Win32 wrapper which most of my "job" is gutting out those calls, implementing Single Responsibility in functions and plugging in Electron UI. And trying not to break EVERYTHING...
Still using PB compiler. Tried to reach out to the company that bought the right to it and killed it because I wanted to extract the parser from it and make it target LLVM to be cross platform, but after a year of trying to contact them I gave up. I will have to build my own compiler at some point with Claude Code which won't be too difficult as WSR only uses a subset of PowerBasic so. When I first tried to build a compiler two years ago I didn't understand all the gotchas in PowerBasic as I do now. But right now I'm just focused on testing the game, fixing bugs, and getting it to Early Access so many I can get up to minimum wage in sales with the time I have invested in the project!
PowerBasic does have functions. Go there is thousands of goto and gosub which would need to be unraveled which there isn't really a 1:1 for gosub at least in say C++. Or EXIT IF... The bane of my existence...
a) At the time it was impossible for me. I think I could actually do it now. But now that I can read the BASIC... what would be the point? If I wanted it cross platform, I will build a virtual machine.
b) Claude Code has performed exceptionally well. I haven't tried the most recent Codex update. But I don't see the point in spending thousands of dollars on tokens to rewrite it when it works perfectly fine. It would be much cheaper to have Claude Agent build the virtual machine. That's just my opinion. If it ain't broke don't fix it I guess. I do want to bring it to mobile though, whether that's a phone app or responsive website.
Can the original code simulate the stock market as it operates today? The main reason I would want to convert the engine to a modern language is to make it easy enough to understand that I could add features.
I think it will definitely need refactored in order to do an overhaul like that.
But the best way I can answer your question. WSR does not claim to simulate real markets. It probably leans too much into fundamentals for our time, at least for the blue chip stocks in the game. What is actually is is a M&A and tax evasion simulator on top of a financial market sandbox to create tax implications to be avoided.
I now work on the "real thing" and that is fascinating to read. I didn't know about Wall Street Raider. Anyone who's ever tried a "paper trading account" on a real brokerage app knows how poor these are: it's near impossible to simulate the real thing without implementing the real thing.
One thing I really don't understand at all is how it's possible to do so much in only 115 kloc. 115 000 lines of code is next to nothing for such a project: there are solo projects with more lines of code than that. It simply ain't that much: how can you simulate mergers, financial derivatives, etc. all in so little lines of code?
It is, simply put, a little codebase. Which makes it all the more impressive.
I mean: it's both a lot (for the time) and nothing for what it does. I'm sure brokerage apps have 10x that amount of code and they only deal with the client side of things. I understand the game doesn't reproduce everything but it still looks incredibly impressive to me to pack so much in so little lines of code. Doubly so if this is sufficient to teach people the basics of finance and trading.
Now something else: this reminds me a bit of a game by the company FTL (created in 1982), who created Dungeon Master. Before that game FTL did "Sundog: The Frozen Legacy". In Sundog they implemented an interpreter for a programming language so that they could write their game (otherwise the default languages available were too limitating) and... You could buy/sell stuff across planets, that you'd transport in your spaceship. They had started writing a complex trading engine for the game: the player was supposed to be able to place buy/sell orders and whatnots but eventually they gave up that part of the game. FWIW when I was playing Sundog The Frozen Legacy I was feeling I was Han Solo in my spaceship: great memories.
Wishing the best to Ben Ward and sending big thanks to Jenkins. These kind of entries are why I'm on HN.
Others attempted to build from scratch or port it without the original developer's involvement. I worked directly with Michael and built a bridge layer into his existing codebase rather than rewriting it.
The source was available, but with cryptic variable names and (apparently) no or little comments:
> Ward mentioned that the biggest bottleneck was the cryptic variable names—short abbreviations that were common in old-school programming but made the code nearly impossible to follow.
> "He not only commented everything," Ward marveled, "he went through every single line of code and renamed every single variable for me in about three days.
I think it's still fair to use the term "reverse engineering".
Sorry I am slow! I do it on the side so. Bear with me. I try to market and post updates when I can. Even this onslaught of comments from hitting frontpage is overwhelming but I am trying to be gratious and respond to everyone!
I read this in it's entirety. Not skimmed through it, but read every single word (took about 30 minutes)
You can imagine my disappointment when in the end, the code is still basically a mystery, and a wrapper around the core game was made.
Not because what you did is not hard or impressive, it's because, up until the line were you said you are going to use a wrapper, you made it seem like you're deciphering the code. That isn't really clickbait, because I had already clicked and spent 20 minutes reading. Being misled felt a bit bad, considering how beautifully the story is written.
The code is not a mystery anymore! I'm going to rewrite the article from the feedback I received here. Because I do understand the code now, but it still has been been rewritten even though I could now. This is so Micheal can still add his ideas to the game. Not because I can't work on the code myself, I can. I can code in BASIC now, Micheal can ONLY code in BASIC.
I would love to do this. I do plan to code a PowerBasic virtual machine in order to make the game cross platform which would allow for a future with Wall Street Raider Online because my true dream? I want to play it on my phone!
Super cool stuff! I love the idea of games being refurbished to the point that it can be kept, almost source original, and still played years down the line. For example, I love Another World for this, being just a bytecode blob where each port is just a VM (good writeup: https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons/index.html).
I am working with Michael to remaster it. He transferred the domain name to me and I just redid the website. I'm not sure when the last time he updated Roninsoft website, but he has "retired" from working on WSR, although has been a huge help with the remaster. https://www.roninsoft.com/#:~:text=!!!%20Check%20out%20WallS...
How does the deal with the original author work with regard to the ownership of the copyright?
I mean, the article means passing the torch but how exactly is this assured in case the author dies and the estate holders don't release the copyright?
Congratulations Ben! The game sounds like a dangerous cult that I want no part of. But I've also done game ports recently and was curious - how much of the old codebase did you need to understand (and change!) in order to port it? And how much could you just wrap up / virtualise, and start building on top?
It is a cult and you should run while you still can. I would say to get to the point I'm so now I had to understand 40-50% of it. Let's face it, I work as a software developer and I don't remember half of the code in the project, maybe more, and I wrote it all! And this is way more complex than a business app. The reason I had to understand a lot is hard to explain but I will try... Basically a function might be called "FrontBuy". In this function contains all the math and all the decision tree logic and workflow for every possible situation to buy a stock. So now you say, let's replace all the Win32 dialogs with Electron front end. So what I did was I maintain essentially a high level GUI state manager in the Power Basic which controls the Electron app, using the C++ DLL as a FFI. That being said, you had to have some modicum of understanding of every function, maybe not all the math, but at the very least the workflow and structure of the PB code so that you don't break anything. And oh boy, did I break everything, many many times, to the chagrin of my beta testers.
That is a really good idea. I totally forgot to include the link in that part of the story. I will definitely be making that change! Well, here is the one I think you are referring to: https://www.reddit.com/r/tycoon/s/bzjG709MLB
So, it sounds like you are in a perfect position to tell us whether Epstein's statement is right, THAT WALL STREET "makes trading way more complicated than it needs to be, because of all the money they make"
wow, that was pain to read. I was expecting the technical side debugging, instead I get the article about literally nothing FULL of unverifiable claims and lore.
Good luck doing that without proper tests - I assume finance stuff is quite complicated and blanked porting with AI is insanely difficult, especially companies have failed in porting it by hand.
For the longest time I've had this feeling in the back of my head that most of the AI hype is from people who were bad at the job to begin with so they can't recognise limitations. This comment is a perfect example
Sorry for LLM flavor in the article. It's valid criticism and I will rewrite it when I get the chance. I just wanted to share the story and I didn't have time to write it completely from scratch, plus I'm not that great of a writer. I thought filtering my thoughts through LLM editor would eliminate the distraction of my poor writing abilities, which for most people I think it worked. For others, it created another distraction, ragebait in fact, which was not my iuntention. So between working 80 hours a week at the prompt factory and raising two kids I will find some time to de-ragebaitify the article, although it seems to have unintentionally propelled it to the front page, for which I am admittedly thankful for.
If this comment wasn’t from an LLM, you write well enough to not need one butchering your text.
I'm sensitive to detecting LLM writing and it wasn't distracting at all reading this. It read well! Awesome work.
I agree with this completely.
I agree with this agreement. Read the lot with no problems. It's an exciting piece.
I'm sorry that the focus on whether this article was written by an LLM or not, rather than the fact that you spent years on a labor of love. It's an excellent effort and I don't care whether the article about it was written by an LLM or not, I enjoyed it.
You don't need to rewrite anything, unless, I guess, you already have. The text that's up there now is just fine. Long, yes, but then it's a long story, and it makes for an enjoyable read.
There's a crowd of ludds around here who (paraphrasing another Churchill besides the one you wrote about) won't change their minds about AI and can't change the subject. One thing you can be certain of is that even if you rewrite the text to sound more human, they still aren't going to buy the game. Ignore them, and keep doing what you've been doing!
To better understand the feedback, see another example that was posted recently, about "Brownie Mary":
https://urbanists.social/@raineyday@beige.party/115793532206...
It's an inspirational true story and well-written. Then notice if the writing style feels familiar. The short sentences. It becomes the visual equivalent of these realistic AI photos, where it looks mostly right, but some feels a little off in the same way that something else you read recently felt a little off.
I'm glad I read the Brownie Mary Story and this Wall Street Raider story as well, but I also don't look forward to a future flooded with content that's "in the style of a professional writer" without some of the details and authentic voice that helps writing really connect.
There certainly are arenas where LLM writing provokes adverse reactions, and in general I think people are becoming less tolerant of it.
Personally, I often find the smell of AI annoying, but I don't mind the way you used it in this article, and after all, there are some good use cases for AI writing.
I assume it will become easier and commonplace to configure LLMs to produce 'de-ragebatified' writing styles.
Pretty soon I reckon we'll be so inundated with AI content in all media that it simply won't be possible or rational to be offended by it, it will just become our new reality, our new world.
I would say you shouldn't apologize, that's what ai tools are for, to help us humans. Instead of rewriting manually, try a specialized for writing tool such as bookswriter.xyz or sudowrite
Don’t bother. The article is great.
It's definitely a time/energy vs quality tradeoff. You say you're not that great of a writer, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that. But I can tell that your natural narration style is much higher quality and more enjoyable to read than what an LLM can generate (even if it's trying to copy your personal style).
It's a tough tradeoff for me both as a consumer and as a do-er. I am very sensitive to LLM-isms. Like many other millennials, (even if perhaps not quite most) I grew up online from a young age when text was the only viable communication medium, so I learned to notice incredibly small nuances of how someone writes and use those nuances to infer/personify the narrator. LLM's not only stick out like a sore thumb, their language actually "jams up" my 'text-personifier' neurological circuits. It's like my brain is saying "WTF? Why can't I synthesize any reasonable model of the person who wrote this?" the entire time, even if I know it's AI. That's frustrating, exhausting, and alienating.
So yeah, as I said: It's a tough tradeoff for me both as a consumer and as a do-er. I'm glad you used an LLM to do the write-up so that it shows up here and I can enjoy the work you did. I often use LLM's to write documentation at my startup for both my own reference and for my cofounders. I don't like it, but it's better than not doing it, and sometimes it's better to spend that time on other things, especially when the thing I'm documenting is subject to change very shortly.
I think the sweet spot, for me, is this:
If you're going to write it with an LLM, do so unapologetically. Put a disclaimer at the top. Understand that what you are delivering to your audience is not the LLM output, but whatever output was generated from your own input (work, vision, ingenuity, perseverance). Keep the LLM generated content concise, sharing only the necessary narrative and information to give consumers the context they need to understand whatever the actual work product is. The less slop I have to struggle through, the better - LLM's are absolutely awful at narration. And then make it easy to explore your actual work product!
I'm not sure my strategy might cause posts to never reach the front-page. I hope that our audiences can understand that this might be the best compromise and come to accept it in some cases. I will continue to point out when HN posts show strong signs of being LLM generated (as judged by my own tuned sense of nuance, empathy, and theory of mind...not whether they use em-dashes) but the intent isn't to tell people "this isn't worth reading". The intent of disclosing LLM generation is to inform people that the best way to consume the content is to switch to their personal "I'm reading LLM generated content"-mode and experience it through that lens.
Interestingly, my startup seems to have taken a somewhat similar strategy with vibe-coding. We're all aware that vibe-generated codebases are objectively worse, harder to read, and harder to maintain than our best hand-written code. It tends to fail on dumb edge cases and just doesn't have the "vision" that hand-written code would, because it glosses over decisions that we'd have paused and thought about for awhile before adjusting our vision and proceeding. But doing the initial proof-of-concept or prototype with LLM's greatly speeds up the period of exploration where we go "We're pretty sure there's a good a way to do this, and we're pretty sure we know what that way is, but there's a few unknowns that need to be proven". With hand-coding, those "unknowns" can take a long time to work through. With vibe-coding, we can try several different strategies, learn about the reality of implementing those strategies, and then go back and hand-write something more maintainable from scratch once we're pretty sure we've landed on the approach that we judge will be "stable". The timeline/priority for converting vibe-code to hand-code depends on how long we expect that code to last, how central it is to the system, and how important it is for humans to be able to debug, maintain, and interface with it.
This is such a well written story, and congratulations Ben, it sounds like it's been a lot of hard but ultimately successful work!
I know you'll deservedly get a lot of credit for all your work in remastering the game, but you should also get credit for how you've woven this narrative together, it's a lovely read. Thank you for taking the time to write it up, and good luck with the Steam release, and whatever project you take on next! :)
Thank you sir and I'm glad you enjoyed the story! I hope it's successful but we will see.
I really enjoyed this article as well!
I'm still curious, however:
> That's not a marketing angle—it's a headline that writes itself.
Any ChatGPT assistance there?
Claude actually! Yeah the content editing was heavily LLM assisted as I'm a terrible writer and I wanted the read to be enjoyable. So I compiled all the research and worked with Claude to build the article. I then attempted to go through with a fine tooth comb and write it in my own words. That is one particular sentence I missed with a highly recognizable LLM pattern which I will fix. I simply also don't have time to really market the game, I care more about the quality of the software. I know if the software is great then it will be successful. But I wanted to share the story in a compelling way. Apologies if it was distracting!
To me, it read like your typical reporter writing a story for nontechnical readers, which is exactly what it is. I thought it was fine.
You could look at it like Claude was the reporter writing the story, with your collaboration.
Totally fine, thanks for the answer.
I wonder why LLMs do this so persistently (the ‘it’s not this it’s that’)? Is there really so much of this style of writing out there?
Marketing copy has been using this rethorical artifact for decades, as well as journalism with some success, it is like an analogy, but pruned down in meanin by the opposition. It is impactful, and probably got high marks with the humans doing RHLF, that I suppose, came mostly from journalism and marketing schools.
I think it comes from the RLHF. If you haven't interacted with LLMs enough to get turned off by it, I think that kind of speech is seen as powerful and confident.
RLHF = Right Left Hand Foot. It's a technique in Bavarian interpretative folk dance where you jump around, artfully hitting the soles of your feet with your hands in order to court women who are busy carrying unbelievable numbers of beer Steins into the mountains.
That's what came to mind when I saw the abbreviation. Then I looked it up:
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback.
"Rood Luck, Have Fun!" A rood is a unit of area that is equal to about one fifth of a football field.
Um, isn't it also a synonym for the cross?
Indeed. But the area conversion tool appeared first when I went looking for it.
It is a staple of marketing and journalism writing. And the guys doing the HF on it most probably came from this exact background: marketing and journalism.
Professionally typeset books. Designers have been typing it—and the other dashes—manually using modifiers+hyphen on Mac since 1984. You can type them—plus the bullet character—today on iOS by doing a long press on the hyphen key.
I’m not talking about the em-dash, which is not a great indicator IMO but the horrible overuse of binary oppositions with a kind of false surprise, e.g.:
The problem was not em-dashes — but binary opposition!
That sort of thing.
It is a much clearer marker of llm use than the em-dash. The sad thing is when searching for info on this the most convincing reply in search was generated by an LLM, which went on at length about why LLMs do this as some sort of consequence of their internal structure. I have absolutely no idea if that’s true — it really sounds a bit trite and exactly the kind of thing LLMs would confidently assert with no basis. I would want to hear from someone working in LLMs, but their blogs are probably all generated by an LLM nowadays. So this conundrum is a good example of a question where LLMs actively work against clear resolution.
This is in my view the most insidious damage word generators are inflicting on our culture — we can no longer assume most writing is honest or well-meaning because amoral LLMs fundamentally are not wired to make that distinction of true and untrue or right and wrong (unlike most humans) and many people will use and trust what they generate without question, polluting the online space and training data until everything is just a morass of half-known facts sprinkled with generated falsehoods that are repeated so often they seem true.
How do we check sources when the sources themselves were generated by LLMs?
My personal feel (completely subjective) is that during RLHF humans are incredibly sensitive to this pattern, especially when talking about personal or emotional issues. Any reply in the form of "it's not you, it's them" is such a dopamine hit that the LLMs started applying it for everything else.
An interesting topic for some postgraduate student's thesis perhaps!
The em-dash meme, if it's actually a thing, I find really annoying. That's the style in a lot of places and for a lot of people with or without spaces on either side. It was house style a a few different places I worked over about 25 years. More broadly, I assume LLMs are training on how a lot of people actually write. I'm not changing my writing style because some people will flag it as LLM-generated <shrug>.
Apologies! You have a point.
I wonder this too. Is there so much of this style, or does it indicate some aspect of the LLMs’ sensemaking?
Whatever it is that caused "It's not X, It's Y", it's more recent than LLMs as a whole.
As far as I remember, neither GPT3.5, GPT4, nor Claude Instant did it. I think Gemini was the first to really do it, and then out of nowhere, everybody was doing it.
I'm only annoyed that I cant buy it right now!
> This is such a well written story, [...] you should also get credit for how you've woven this narrative together, it's a lovely read.
Don't forget to give credit to the LLM too which wrote the story for him.
Sure, it's 2026 I used Claude to write a lot of it. But tell me this. Do you know which paragraphs I wrote?
Setting aside the style, I think you asked for more output — 5,000 words — than your prompt supports, so the model repeated the same details over and over to stretch out the story after it hits the major notes.
Obvious tells are repetitive numeric details: the number of lines of code (mentioned six times!), the number of pages in the manual, the ages of the developers, the age of the game, etc. The narrative itself also repeats, like the Steam rejection included verbatim twice, especially after the Prologue hit most of the beats in the first 400 words.
I did that on purpose, I thought it needed to be reiterated. See, you're blaming the AI but that was me. I did not specify a word count. Maybe I should have let the AI write the whole thing? Like I said I am not a great writer, especially content editing. Even with AI I couldn't make everyone happy. Oh well.
Dude why do you meet every valid criticism with such passive aggressive defence? It doesn't come off well at all.
It has a particular style I’ve seen lately using more short confident sentences as professional writers do. But it lacks the professional writer’s sense of when to add an anecdote and when to leave out a detail. And it is this juxtaposition that gives it a distinctive LLM feel of being written in the style of a professional writer, yet something is off.
Please don't feel the need to be defensive about this. People are reacting in a predictable way to a shift in how effort is perceived.
Where one formerly could use a certain way of writing as a heuristic for effort put into content they are spending time ingesting, now that heuristic is meaningless and a new one must replace it.
At this point some people have decided 'has markers of AI writing' is the heuristic to match 'no/low effort' on, and are trying to use shame in order to start a system of self-policing against it. Unfortunately that isn't going to work, because
1. the heuristic is flawed
2. most people are going to end up using AI tools for writing, since writing well is difficult
I don't agree that it's flawed. There's so much to gain by writing your own words. It's something to practice and after a while, it's even fun to be able to express something the way you intended. Even today I do my own writeups and articles manually. I want the text to come from me, to show how I'd put it, even if I have a typo here and there. I feel like it's worth it to keep your own personality instead of having AI do it for you - or even edit for you. Even if you think your writing suck, it's still your voice and it's just more interesting for me to read an actual human being.
I agree honestly. I just wanted to get the story out and share it and I'm swamped IRL. But I'm going to go back and clean it up when I get the chance. I do appreciate the constructive feedback from everyone and I will do better.
It’d be an interesting exercise to just write it again yourself without referring to the LLM article then compare the two to see which bits of each are better. Yours would be shorter, but perhaps better and more honest?
Just wanted to say don't worry about it too much. I do advocate for writing because I like it and I feel it rewards me. But you made a decision to do it a certain way and that's fine. Don't let people tear you down for this.
I don't use AI for my writing and I agree with you. I meant that it is bad heuristic because people often do put a lot of effort into posts with AI writing styles in them, so it is not accurate due to a large amount of false positives. If one performs a test that is wrong a significant percentage of the time then it will be eventually abandoned.
> Please don't feel the need to be defensive about this.
No, do. Really.
The heuristic isn't going away because we have limited time. Let's say you can clock AI in the first paragraph.
There are lots of places like Linkedin where people write slop articles saying basically nothing insightful, and AI allows them to write at Isaac Asimov or Brandon Sanderson type speeds. AI slop has no cost, so it will always outweigh insightful AI-assisted writing without careful curation. You will have read thousands of articles that begin in AI-evident formats that don't end in anything good.
That will always poison the well of somebody at the end of that first paragraph. They will consider the source, think "What are the odds this is more slop", and often click out.
People who I know don't speak English natively get a pass from me because no amount of effort in the short term is going to substitute for fluency, but everybody else... less so.
I honestly get it. I wouldn't have made that comment but I get why it was made. It tells me I need to go back and put some more effort into it and clean it up. You know, in-between working 80 hours a week at the prompt factory and working on the actual game... Without Claude there would be no story to read. I pay Anthropic $200/mo and Claude is a robot. I don't think anyone shed a tear that I didn't put "coauthored by Claude" at the bottom.
It has nothing to do with missing "coauthored by Claude"
The problem is you're wasting other people's time, with long and low quality writing.
One of the points of writing your own words is to gather your own thoughts. The value of writing skills is to organize the delivery. But the first point is that they are your thoughts.
I think your replies are seriously missing the criticism.
Most people enjoyed it. It is the same as the game. Most people like the remaster direction, a subgroup vehemently dislike specific design decisions and they don't always overlap. The more people that learn about the game the volume of feedback goes up and so does the volume of negative feedback. Just telling you feel my perspective, take it when a grain of salt. So you learn to take negatively, especially emotionally charged negativity, with a grain of salt. And you have a compulsion to ignore it. But I'm a very self aware person and I try to see the other side. I may not understand it, I may not agree, but I try to listen and understand. But to say I blanket missing the criticism is a flippant remark in my opinion. I'm not an idiot... It's easy to tell AI was involved and it turned many people off. But they also crap on the stuff I wrote from scratch. So is it AI or just that I suck at writing? It was just to share the story. I reread it multiple times and I enjoy the story even knowing it like the back is my hand. I lived it. I write stuff for me. I remastered the game for me and to share with like minded people. Honestly, the article being anti-AI rage bait is a low pass filter for people who could have said anything, and instead, they chose to NIT the article. But I try to be open minded and do better, but I am only human, not an AI, I have emotions and opinions. I'm sure most of those opinions are flawed. But I'm not mad at any of the criticism and I appreciate it.
I would like to congratulate you on your self-awareness.
I honestly think you're wildly missing the point.
Writing is not about writing. Admittedly, that is a trick sentence [what does it mean??] and it exists because I'm trying to get you to re-evaluate my next words. And, I am doing this because I think you are missing the point.
Writing is about organizing your thoughts. You cannot have someone else organize your thoughts. Once you approach writing as a thought excercise, and not an output excercise, then there is a world of nuance and writing is more than just organizing your thoughts.
Further, you have allegedly spent 3 years on this. I know you're busy. That said, you can certainly spend 3 days on writing if you spent 3 years working on this.
Please don't double down on acting like everyone is just a hater. There is more depth to the criticism than I think is being acknowledged.
P.s, if you feel "blocked" writing and think of it as just about output, try this: (0) Ask yourself what you want to convey, why; to whom. (1) Write without inhibition (2) Edit, cut, delete. Refer to (0); look at what seems higher word count in proportion to its value.
There are other tips to editing and writing. This is one rough off the cuff formula that I think tracks & may benefit you, especially since you seem to see yourself as a worse writer than you may actually be.
Tip for you. If you don’t like something, downvote and move on. The insipid nature of repeating the same disagreement is lacking the spirit here.
There's no reason to be so nasty. The fact that it's currently on the top 5 posts on HN means you're dead wrong, he's not wasting anyone's time.
TBH I found it one of the most interesting and engaging articles I've seen on HN in a long time. The writing itself is not great, but the story is great.
The content isn’t low quality, though. The form got LLM signatures all over, but the story itself is quite interesting.
You’re wasting your time replying here. You should save it and stop.
I, for one, enjoyed the read. Would love even more details though!
Is there any questions in particular you're curious about details-wise? I can certainly try to answer or reach it to MJ.
I’d love to read more about how the original code looks like - examples of the parts that would be so difficult to transpile / understand and so on. And perhaps an overview of the game’s architecture? It surely is a unique piece of code due to the complexity, and I’m sure there are many interesting parts and algorithms there.
Speaking of LLMs, I recently used Claude Code on my own old codebase to do such a writeup, and it ended up a very nice read for myself too - Claude managed to explain some parts of what I built better than I did :D
I don't, because I stopped reading after I recognized LLM output. You could basically take all the comments you wrote in this thread verbatim and it would still be better, even if there are some grammar errors here or there. Please give yourself more credit.
I.Don't.Care.
I enjoyed the narrative. It was true. Who cares if it was written by a ghost writer, an AI or anything else.
I did not read it because the prose was insipid. Maybe the project is interesting, but I won't know because I'm not going to read an infomercial. You must understand that this stuff is not to everyone's taste.
So if something is written by an LLM it makes it an infomercial?
Also, what are you comparing this post to? Because you should compare it to the author’s own writing and according to the author, his writing is not that good.
If the author cannot write then he should not write.
Move along then? Anecdotal datapoint but all the anti LLM comments in here are a lot of less than a year old accounts.
If you don’t like something simply move along. Constructive criticism is great but the volume of overly negative and honestly nasty replies like yours are not in the spirit of HN.
>Constructive criticism is great
Good, I will continue to voice it. Unfortunately it takes me several thousand times longer to complain about AI slop polluting the bulletin than it does to populate the bulletin with AI slop, which is the actual nastiness going on here.
Nope the only nastiness is how critical mean you are in your replies. All it takes is a quick hey I appreciate the article but not the use of a LLM to write it. None of the other words you have used are in the spirit here. Move along.
Thankfully you came up with this pulitzer prize of a comment all on your own, didn't you?
Can we stop with this? The world has changed, LLMs exist, people use them, and "omg LLMs" is a very tired trope now. If you didn't like the article, you can critique it, but "you used a tool I don't like" is just boring.
Why should I spend more time reading something than the person spent writing it? The fact is that generating large amounts of text without care or effort has become very easy, so it makes perfect sense to discard writing with LLM signatures.
> Why should I spend more time reading something than the person spent writing it?
The labor theory of value doesn't work in economics and it also doesn't work in literary criticism. You should spend time reading something if reading it is valuable. You shouldn't if it isn't.
The trouble is it's impossible to magically know in advance if something is worth reading. You have to use secondary information to guess. Until recently "it appears that the author put effort into writing it" was a vaguely useful signal, but LLMs have ruined that.
Actually that's not even the only issue. Another reason people hate this is because it's inconsiderate - it's like people who leave voicemails or say "hi" in chat. They are not respecting my time.
> The trouble is it's impossible to magically know in advance if something is worth reading. You have to use secondary information to guess.
This was true in the past, and is still true now.
> Until recently "it appears that the author put effort into writing it" was a vaguely useful signal, but LLMs have ruined that.
This isn't true now and wasn't true in the past.
Until recently, the only way to know whether the author put effort into writing the piece was to read it. Simply continue doing what you've always been doing.
That's simply not true. Before AI it took effort to write. Even rambly nonsense takes some effort, and even then rambly nonsense is usually obvious without having to read much.
AI changes things so that you can produce text that seem like it was written with care and effort very easily automatically. It requires significantly more effort from the reader to figure out that it is worthless.
It really is different.
I personally find LLM text exceptionally boring and tiresome to read. It is often incredibly voluminous and filed with trite phrasing that turns a one sentence idea into 3 paragraphs of pablum.
Yes, this has been inspired by a senior management figure in my company posting a clearly LLM assited 500 word slack message that could have been 2 lines.
"I find this article exceptionally boring and tiresome to read" is fine. "This article was generated by an LLM, and therefore it will be boring and tiresome" is just bias.
How about people who want to spam LLM output just provide their input alongside the output? I'd be happy to read their input.
My thought is that if you don’t care enough to even write it then why should I care to read it? The answer for me is that I don’t.
I and many others find it a useful warning. So I doubt people will stop noting it as part of a critique of things.
'You used a tool I don't like' is really missing the point.
'You generated text that is long and a bit boring and will probably include falsehoods.' is a more accurate description of why people pick up on this - the style is an indicator of using a tool that generates convincing garbage.
What I want is for THIS to stop. "Listen, no one wants to hear about your moral issues, just stfu."
Don't give up so easily. Let the discomfort in and try & figure out why people keep saying "omg LLMs" until you can hear what they are actually saying.
It's tiresome. I would rather read the bullet points he fed in and be done.
Congrats on such an achievement. The remake looks great, but those DOS screenshots have an undeniable charm. With such a large scale game, something I always find interesting is uncovering what types of quirks and bugs bubble underneath the surface in the original version. Did you come across anything obvious in your testing?
The reason I discovered options prices were wrong is because for fun I created an In-The-Money visualization graph for when you're doing advanced options spreads and I noticed that the graph was asymetrical and profitability and loss made no sense. So with the help of Claude we debugged the code and came up with a pricing strategy that was closer to Black-Scholes. And it really is because it takes into account industry volatility and such it was a fun side quest and Michael is happy with the result which I am very proud of! It really makes me confident that one day, long live the king but, he is in his 80s. Decades from now I will be able to survive on my own, I hope.
But wait... That's a real phenomenon in markets, called volatility skew!
Volatility Skew: An uneven curve indicating directional bias. Commonly, equity markets show negative skew (higher implied volatility for OTM puts), signaling concerns about downside risks.
Options pricing is a real rabbit hole.
https://www.luxalgo.com/blog/volatility-smile-vs-skew-key-di...
Well, sometimes the way to teach people about pricing is to present them with incorrectly priced markets to exploit?
The market price IS the correct price. As is often said, "all models are wrong, but some are useful", including B-S.
Options pricing was not correct, which MJ knew because he simply based it on lookup table using ratios of a spread on a random security in his brokerage account decades ago! I tried to implement Black-Scholes best I could, my one contribution to the engine thus far. MJ has patched several things such as runaway interest rates and commodity prices, too-easy crypto price movements. Typos here and there. Certain edge cases that only a highly skilled player would ever come across, which due to the Discord server brought those players out of the woodwork to battle harden the game and a place for them to report the things they always knew but never had the motivation to report. But for the most part the engine is pretty damn solid.
Sounds like MJ pioneered not only financial simulators, but also vibe coding
This was an interesting story, but implying this is some unique insight irked me a little - perhaps because it is LLM-flavoured text that hypes it too much, and makes it sound like some kind of major breakthrough? Keeping the original game as-is, underneath a modern port 'layer', is a pretty popular and common way to update things, you can see it being done in a bunch of modern remasters.
As a dude with an enterprise development background it was my first thought. Rewrites are almost never the answer.
A technical question for you around the porting being a dead end:
I see from other replies that you now understand the code reasonably well and feel you can expand/extend it while keeping it in BASIC. However, I note you've also done project where you automatically ported Fortran to Lua - are you not interested in trying to do something similar for performance/maintainability reasons? Is there an advantage in keeping it in PowerBASIC?
I've wish listed the game, and look forward to playing it, it sounds like great fun - even the manual sounds like a good read.
I did exactly that originally. But here is the reality. Michael only knows BASIC and he has felt the agency to continue patching and working on the code, adding features even, since it is still BASIC. When others tried to port it to C++ be felt like he had no agency and wasn't motivated to help. So while he's still motivated to work on it, it needs to stay in a language he can work with. And thanks for wishlisting!!!
Great reasoning, can't argue with that. Let him continue to work on his creation while he can.
Is the whole thing going to be open sourced? I feel if enough people had access it could be ported to any language with today's tools and people.
Is it possible to write a black box regression test framework?
> Is the whole thing going to be open sourced?
It seems to be a one-of-a-kind simulation product that could be used as part of actual financial/trading training. There's insane value here, giving the source code away for free is absolutely not a good strategy.
I think it is pretty unreasonable to call CP/M "primitive beyond belief". It was basically equivalent to MS-DOS in capability -- after all, MS-DOS was basically an unlicensed clone of CP/M for the 8086.
> It was basically equivalent to MS-DOS in capability
MS-DOS 2.0 was a huge improvement, the first release didn't even support subdirectories or hard drives.
Yes. Primitive behind belief.
There was a time in the world when most PC users could drive the C prompt.
I suspect more computer users in total can use the terminal today than then
More in number, or as a percentage of people who use computers?
I’d believe the first one, but not the second. Even if you didn’t count the many people who only use completely closed systems like iOS, Chromebook, or the ordering kiosk at McDonalds in the denominator.
Only because more exist. As a % of total, I highly doubt that.
It is said be way of comparison to modern platforms. Which seems pretty accurate.
Ms-dos was primitive beyond belief. Barely more than a program loader.
> after all, MS-DOS was basically an unlicensed clone of CP/M for the 8086.
Eh, not really. The file system was very different and these early operating systems were mostly a file system. The system calls were almost identical…
You can tell that by the end of it you got tired and it's less manually edited and more straight from the LLM's mouth.
I don't really care in this case though, it's an awesome story and it doesn't detract too much. Congratulations!
Good eye! I hope to go back and finish editing it. But it's better use of my time to work on the game itself. But hey, I did all the research at least which took me years so. I just wanted to share the story instead of listing bullet points. I have pretty bad ADHD so, I didn't wanted the article to be a rambling.
The vast, vast majority of people are never going to play the game. For most of us this write up is the closest we will ever get to the work you've done. Under that lens, the writeup is strangely more important than the work.
I think the game should be more important to the developer…
This is my favorite thing I’ve read on Hacker News, ever. Congratulations Ben and Michael, I’m so glad you both had the tenacity to make this happen. Well done.
Regarding "The Second Oldest Game Developer", there are also the authors of "Spacewar!": Steve Russell was born in 1937, meaning, he's either 89 or will be 89 this year. Dan Edwards must be around that age, as well.
Spacewar was ported to Plato from Control Data; I played a little, but I played a lottt of Avatar. There are a number of Plato games that probably have some older / early game developers. Out of curiosity I just looked up Avatar, Bruce Maggs coded it in ‘76 and went on to among other things be one of the Akamai founders. But he’s 20 years younger than Russell.
I am definitely sharing this with Michael he will be happy to be pushed down in the dinosaur ranking!
A few more candidates for the ranking: Peter Samson (of Expensive Planetarium fame, the background star simulation of Spacewar!, and known for his music on the PDP-1, also author of the TMRC Dictionary [0], still active with the CHM PDP-1 team) born in 1941, Ellen Kuhfeld (Minnesota Spacewar [1] for the CDC 3100 at the University of Minnesota, 1966-68) is also in her 80s.
[0] https://www.gricer.com/tmrc/dictionary1959.html
[1] https://masswerk.at/spacewar/kuhfeld/
The two developers mentioned/compared were for the games the op has ported.
Spacewar.com was such a classic game. Why wasn't it an exe??
> Why wasn't it an exe??
It was originally a PDP-1 game. If you are talking about the PC remake by B. Seiler, it was only 9KB. There is no need to bother with a relocation table if it's under 64KB.
As the saying goes, strike while the iron is hot. Wall Street Raider will be released to Early Acces on March 12, 2026. https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/3525620/view/5951738...
Reading between the lines, the game logic itself hasn’t been reverse engineered yet, so adding, changing, or fixing logic still means working with the original code that only Michael Jenkins understands to this day. In any case: massive props to Ben. This feels like a strong foundation, and I’m excited to see him continue evolving the game.
It was never really reverse engineering as the source code was available to the developers (including Ben), and Michael even took the time to give meaningful names to variables, etc. I suppose the author meant to say it was hard to actually understand what's going on both in Power Basic and in the domain of knowledge because of the massive complexity of the game.
That is almost entirely true and yes it's a click baity title, and it worked ha!
Tenuous relevance, but a different stock market game written in BASIC on the Apple II (well, I only had access to the Franklin Ace clone) was my initial motivation at age 10 or so to try programming. It was a pretty thrilling amount of power to a 10-year-old to be able to rename all the companies after my friends or whatever jokes I wanted, and next to alter the rules to get more money. It’s a good thing BASIC was everywhere in the 80s — so many books and computer manuals had enough information that it was easy to find a source to learn the (no pun intended) basics.
> The game he wanted to make required something that didn't exist yet: a personal computer.
> So Jenkins waited.
This part made me laugh out loud. It made me imagine Jenkins as a time traveller who had made a mistake and got stuck in the past, but knew that personal computers would be invented.
Haha sometimes I think he is with the things he tells me.
You should either bundle the DOS version with the game, or release it separately somewhere. If you broke the DOS frontend and don't want to get it working again, maybe release the last working DOS version?
Consider releasing on GOG. This game is great nostalgia bait, and if you release the DOS version, the GOG staff are quite experienced at building modern, cross-OS installers for DOS games and tuning DOSBox.
FWIW I never played this particular game but around the turn of the millenium I put probably over 100 hours in Trevor Chan's Capitalism games [1].
[1] https://www.gog.com/en/game/capitalism_plus
If you get the urge to try Capitalism again, you should take a look at Capitalism Lab [1]. It picks up from the original Capitalism series and adds a lot of UI enhancements / quality of life stuff as well as some new features and moddability.
[1] https://www.capitalismlab.com/
I enjoyed the read. How did you tap into the legacy Power Basic engine? Was there a FFI or some kind of bridge you could hook into? And what languages were you using?
I built an FFI via event dispatching and shared memory pointers/matching structs. Imported the C++ UI layer as a DLL via Win32 LoadLibrary. The PB shares a big array for storing global pointers allowing them to read/write each other's memory. The C++ has an event queue and has DLL functions the PB can call to peek/pop the next event. It actually isn't that complicated, just took me forever to come up with the idea.
As for languages, PB, C++, and JavaScript (Electron/Preact). I chose a no-build UI framework so that it could be modded by players without installing any build tools, just edit the text files in the game folder, and it has been a very good decision.
Indeed very clever. I wonder if you framed this problem up with claude how it would “guide” you to solve this problem. Would be an interesting match up of ai vs human. Love the story!
The feat was done before Claude Agent which is why it was so challenging. Although I admit I am a heavy user now circa the past two weeks. We shall not discuss my Claude Code experience lest I have another mental breakdown at work and my employer has to send me home again. Let me put it this way. I have set up Claude dangerously skip permissions with Agent Teams, Fast Mode, and our automated e2e test suite I designed where it can see screenshots of every step and browser and API console logs. It is entirely hands off software development. I have had to think long and hard about my identity as a software engineer. So forgive me if for my passion project I don't let Claude do everything, lest I remember the decades I spent reading those textbooks on my shelf, and the fear that I will forget it all.
[dead]
That’s awesome. What a clever approach!
So what kind of source code can be so difficult to understand?
I've always wanted to get my hands on the Championship Manager 92/93 source code to see what gave it its "soul". What made that version so special.
Good job! When can I buy it?
I am sold on the game and wishlisted it but lack of release date saddens me.
I love spreadsheet games like Terra Invicta/Paradox/Simutrans and this seems like a terrific example of one.
If I can't get a response from a publisher here soon, I will be setting an Early Access release date of 1-2 months from now to give me some time to build up more wishlists before I pull the trigger.
Please post here when you have a date!
March 12!
This strikes me as a sort of Microprose aligned release. Do you have any publishers in mind?
No, I had considered Microprose, Kitfox, Hooded Horse. I reached out to some but I should have been reaching out a year or two ago. I didn't think I would need one, I still don't think I NEED one... But would have been nice. But I just set a release date as a kick in the butt to get this thing shipped, which pretty much burns the boats of signing a publisher. I think it is better this way though. If it fails it fails. But Michael and I get to keep whatever proceeds are made and we get to do things our way at our pace. But there's other games such as Speculator that also need revamped. I kinda want Hackjack Games to be a remastering game studio, a land of misfit games of sorts. Maybe I'll be more open to having a publisher in the future.
Really cool article! The solution to wrap the engine in a modern UI was a good one. I would have fallen to the trap of trying to port the whole thing, like all the other companies did.
Out of curiosity, how are the things tested? Or is checking core-engine doing things right only up to the developer and their tribal knowledge?
Manual smoke testing and touching the original code as little as possible, for now. I am working on an automated testing solution although it will require a lot of backend changes in order to do create fixtures.
I admittedly only googled quickly but is there anywhere I can buy the original and the book still? I understand he had issues with the payment processor, and I can see free versions to download but I'd prefer to do it legitimately if possible
Join Discord there is a channel dedicated to instructions on contacting him. He no longer sells the game except mailing him a check. A completely unrelated factoid... He LOVES $30 Amazon gift cards...
Hi. I would love to join the server, but unfortunately, the Discord link doesn't work for me.
I'm sure there is truth in original author saying tax code complexity as the core challenge. But that's not what makes this hard. That's domain complexity we all come up against it's accidental complexity that killed the ports.
The real problem is idiosyncratic and esoteric coding practices from a single self-taught accountant working in a language that didn't encourage good structure.
I can translate well-written code without understanding what it does functionally, so long as I understand what it's doing mechanically.
The original author seems to build in the assumption you're not going to translate my code you'll need to rewrite it from the the tax code!
I continue to advocate for the fact that Michael's code is not bad at all. There are some anti patterns in it for sure, what engineer hasn't fallen into those traps. The fact is Michael is an infinitely better programmer than many of the senior developers I've worked work in my career. I truly sing high praise to his software development capabilities, not just coding itself but building the product, delivering results, and getting it out the door, especially a simulator like this with no reference points, no formal training, no help? Sure it took him 40 years and it's in BASIC and uses gosub everywhere. But the damn thing works and for anyone who took the time to learn the language and structure as I did, you will see that it is actually very enjoyable codebase to work with.
the difference between gosub and if blocks calling a function is more academic than practical, you still have a main event loop sending your path of execution someplace based on something that happens.
I might not be a basic practitioner, but as someone who as written serious things in bash and powershell, I can see the allure.
The code is bad by virtue of it putting his wonderful game at risk because no one can port it.
This story is it's own litmus test. Your story is only as notable as bad as Michaels code is!
Don't get me wrong. It seems fantastic game and like others I'm most interested in playing the original DOS version.
But good programs, written by good programmers are not necessarily made with good code!
1) this is super interesting
2) the prose is very LLM-flavored, but for once I don’t mind. It’s obvious to me that this blog post only exists because an interesting, intelligent person used an LLM to lower the cost of extracting complex ideas from their brain.
3) the “Fits of Rationality” process sounds a lot like how coding agents work. They’re alive in the moment, then later all they have to work with is the written record of their previous sessions. The Herculean effort to re-implement the result foreshadows the vibe-coding repair industry.
What a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing! As a mechanical engineer with barely any knowledge or inclination towards coding and/or finance you persuaded me to look into the game.
This is very well written. I have fairly low interest in video games and rarely read gaming content, but read this all the way through. That’s an achievement in itself!
I figured the engineering crowd here would enjoy the technical journey and I am so grateful it got to front page so that I may talk about the technical side which I enjoy doing. I am not a hermit by nature and posting on HN really was a cry for someone to ask me a question about the backend. So I really appreciate all the technical questions gives me an opportunity to get into the weeds a bit.
To be able to write this well and this engagingly is a real talent. And it worked - I sent this to three friends who I always gently mock for playing games that are, effectively, spreadsheets. Two of them said it looks exactly like the sort of thing they will enjoy!
This story is super interesting and I think can teach us some valuable lessons about refactoring and the price of truly understanding the domain in which the code operates. The accompanying article is also a pleasant reading with a nice bit of background, and I really liked the motivation behind "layering" on top instead of rewriting from scratch.
Thanks for bringing this story to HN!
I referenced a LOT of articles and case studies on legacy rewrites and ports in that first year. It is definitely a challenge that even with LLM still exists and I am happy to add to the body of knowledge surrounding the subject.
Well that was a pretty cool story. Really enjoyed that it was sufficiently good for its time that so many people got into the field after enjoying playing it (or perhaps that it was enjoyable enough for so many destined for the field to use). And loved the bit where someone emails him and a few chats later off he sends the source code.
If you dropped the source code here you'd probably get a versiojn in each of the 5 major languages quick smart.
i guess if it was public you could cheat or understand it. its incomprehnsibilty is just like the real markets - you can never know why or how
It's easy to reverse engineer it for cheating purposes if there's a will. Being open source would help strengthening game strategies and logic even.
A magician never reveals his secret...
I loved this game. As soon as I saw the title I knew it would be Wall Street Raider. I play it via dosbox and for me the UI is part of the charm. I’d be interested in tinkering with the pricing simulation but from the article it seems like that’s almost impossible.
Not impossible but a lot of work. But with Custom Data API and Set Game State API you can do a lot of what you may wish you could do from modding the frontend. Not ideal but it goes from impossible to a possible!
Really interesting, thanks for sharing!
I know it almost sounds crass, but you should consider letting an LLM take a crack at transpiling the code. Source to source translations are one of the most widely agreed upon strengths of LLMs.
I can tell you from reading the code in the 90s, no LLM will save you. It’s well written, but it’s not structured like modern programs. IIRC he invented his own trampoline system using goto that will leave you scratching your head for days, just trying to figure out how it works. An LLM might be able to guess, but it def isn’t going to one-shot it and that means you will need to be able to understand it as well.
I do think it is possible with the advent of Claude Agent to transpile the code. First I would refactor the trampoline system to be functional and unit test everything. Then I would use those tests to validate the transpilation. It's something that I would consider doing for a Wall Street Raider 2 to overhaul the engine and deliver massive improvements to the engine itself. I do want to do this to a certain extent to implement automated e2e testing. But I don't mind BASIC at all, prefer it actually, I just want automated testing set up. But a lot of this is beyond the scope of my goals for Early Access release.
Hi Ben. I published an article about this problem this week (and did a talk at Rust Sydney).
What you need is differential, property testing. I’m sure it would work for you (you can skip the first half as you already have the source):
https://reorchestrate.com/posts/bringing-a-warhammer-to-a-kn...
This was a great thing to read this morning, kudos to both!
My "learn options trading" environment, I realized after reading this, really needs a news feed to get a feel for what is happening in the virtual world of the test trading, so I added one today. Still very much playing around with it, the alpha is at https://trading.linsomnaic.com/
Looks like I’m going to need a Windows 10 virtual machine on my Apple Silicon. Or maybe I’ll just buy my first Windows machine since 2001.
https://wallstreetraiderwiki.com/index.php?title=Running_on_...
Oh and… thank you so much for doing this. That game taught me more than you could ever imagine.
Much appreciated.
Ben, that was one of my favorite "internet" stories... What a beautiful generational link!
This is a wonderful project, and the post is a wonderful read!
Are there any plans to break out portions of the Basic engine to a modern language? It's frustrating that the heart of the game remains inscrutable. Surely Ward is tempted?
I understand the code now after working with it for so long. I even improved the options code to use Black-Scholes so I have a few tricks up my own sleeve. The reality is, now that I have mastered the codebase structure and BASIC... Why would I port it? I have plans on how to keep it in BASIC and make it cross platform e.g. web based.
I don't know the project, obviously, so any opinions I could add on porting wouldn't be so meaningful.
It's a lovely achievement you have pulled off, and Jenkins must be tickled.
Ben, thanks for working on this! I instantly flashed back to the mid to late 80s when I saw the screenshots; I’m certain I played this game as a pre-teen. Just let us know how we can buy it.
This is amazing! Having no knowledge of Basic, a.) what makes the rewrite "impossible"? b.) how do coding agents perform on the codebase? It might make for a neat benchmark similar to ARC
I gather the version of Basic is not Object-Oriented.
So the program most likely is flat: a bunch of global variables (and possibly memory addresses), and instructions ordered by line number, rather than functions or methods.
Functions yes, and actually PowerBasic does have OOP. Michael didn't use it but it's there.
No line numbers except for goto labels, but gosub is the challenge for transpilation.
Apparently PowerBasic was the successor to Borland TurboBasic and complied to a native executable. So this wasn't an interpreted 'line number' Basic like our kiddie computers. It also probably had the Borland Windows GUI stuff.
(However it wouldn't surprise me if older 'line number' programs still mostly worked. iirc VB6 also supported this.)
No line numbers but you can use numbers as goto labels. It uses Dynamic Dialog Tools which is a Win32 wrapper which most of my "job" is gutting out those calls, implementing Single Responsibility in functions and plugging in Electron UI. And trying not to break EVERYTHING...
Thanks for clarifying. Super smart approach to adopting legacy code to a modern interface.
Maybe I missed it, but are you still using the Powerbasic compiler or have you worked around that somehow?
Still using PB compiler. Tried to reach out to the company that bought the right to it and killed it because I wanted to extract the parser from it and make it target LLVM to be cross platform, but after a year of trying to contact them I gave up. I will have to build my own compiler at some point with Claude Code which won't be too difficult as WSR only uses a subset of PowerBasic so. When I first tried to build a compiler two years ago I didn't understand all the gotchas in PowerBasic as I do now. But right now I'm just focused on testing the game, fixing bugs, and getting it to Early Access so many I can get up to minimum wage in sales with the time I have invested in the project!
The BASIC from that time was pretty limited, IIRC.
No real functions, only `gosub` and `goto` so everything is a global variable.
I think even assembler for x86 is easier to unravel.
PowerBasic does have functions. Go there is thousands of goto and gosub which would need to be unraveled which there isn't really a 1:1 for gosub at least in say C++. Or EXIT IF... The bane of my existence...
a) At the time it was impossible for me. I think I could actually do it now. But now that I can read the BASIC... what would be the point? If I wanted it cross platform, I will build a virtual machine. b) Claude Code has performed exceptionally well. I haven't tried the most recent Codex update. But I don't see the point in spending thousands of dollars on tokens to rewrite it when it works perfectly fine. It would be much cheaper to have Claude Agent build the virtual machine. That's just my opinion. If it ain't broke don't fix it I guess. I do want to bring it to mobile though, whether that's a phone app or responsive website.
Can the original code simulate the stock market as it operates today? The main reason I would want to convert the engine to a modern language is to make it easy enough to understand that I could add features.
I think it will definitely need refactored in order to do an overhaul like that.
But the best way I can answer your question. WSR does not claim to simulate real markets. It probably leans too much into fundamentals for our time, at least for the blue chip stocks in the game. What is actually is is a M&A and tax evasion simulator on top of a financial market sandbox to create tax implications to be avoided.
I see. So no 'meme stock' and no 'Wacky POTUS' modules!
Maybe as DLC!
I now work on the "real thing" and that is fascinating to read. I didn't know about Wall Street Raider. Anyone who's ever tried a "paper trading account" on a real brokerage app knows how poor these are: it's near impossible to simulate the real thing without implementing the real thing.
One thing I really don't understand at all is how it's possible to do so much in only 115 kloc. 115 000 lines of code is next to nothing for such a project: there are solo projects with more lines of code than that. It simply ain't that much: how can you simulate mergers, financial derivatives, etc. all in so little lines of code?
It is, simply put, a little codebase. Which makes it all the more impressive.
I mean: it's both a lot (for the time) and nothing for what it does. I'm sure brokerage apps have 10x that amount of code and they only deal with the client side of things. I understand the game doesn't reproduce everything but it still looks incredibly impressive to me to pack so much in so little lines of code. Doubly so if this is sufficient to teach people the basics of finance and trading.
Now something else: this reminds me a bit of a game by the company FTL (created in 1982), who created Dungeon Master. Before that game FTL did "Sundog: The Frozen Legacy". In Sundog they implemented an interpreter for a programming language so that they could write their game (otherwise the default languages available were too limitating) and... You could buy/sell stuff across planets, that you'd transport in your spaceship. They had started writing a complex trading engine for the game: the player was supposed to be able to place buy/sell orders and whatnots but eventually they gave up that part of the game. FWIW when I was playing Sundog The Frozen Legacy I was feeling I was Han Solo in my spaceship: great memories.
Wishing the best to Ben Ward and sending big thanks to Jenkins. These kind of entries are why I'm on HN.
... You got the source code, and it was 115 kloc of BASIC, but several other individuals and organizations failed to "reverse-engineer" it?
Others attempted to build from scratch or port it without the original developer's involvement. I worked directly with Michael and built a bridge layer into his existing codebase rather than rewriting it.
Ah, I understand now.
I'm sorry what is the question?
I think they were nitpicking the term "reverse engineering" which is fair if the source is available
The source was available, but with cryptic variable names and (apparently) no or little comments:
> Ward mentioned that the biggest bottleneck was the cryptic variable names—short abbreviations that were common in old-school programming but made the code nearly impossible to follow.
> "He not only commented everything," Ward marveled, "he went through every single line of code and renamed every single variable for me in about three days.
I think it's still fair to use the term "reverse engineering".
Meh, every time a new engineer joins a large project onboarding is actually reverse engineering, with luck assisted by original authors.
I have been eagerly waiting for this project's release since I first heard about it, thanks for the update!
Sorry I am slow! I do it on the side so. Bear with me. I try to market and post updates when I can. Even this onslaught of comments from hitting frontpage is overwhelming but I am trying to be gratious and respond to everyone!
I read this in it's entirety. Not skimmed through it, but read every single word (took about 30 minutes)
You can imagine my disappointment when in the end, the code is still basically a mystery, and a wrapper around the core game was made.
Not because what you did is not hard or impressive, it's because, up until the line were you said you are going to use a wrapper, you made it seem like you're deciphering the code. That isn't really clickbait, because I had already clicked and spent 20 minutes reading. Being misled felt a bit bad, considering how beautifully the story is written.
Impressive work nonetheless.
The code is not a mystery anymore! I'm going to rewrite the article from the feedback I received here. Because I do understand the code now, but it still has been been rewritten even though I could now. This is so Micheal can still add his ideas to the game. Not because I can't work on the code myself, I can. I can code in BASIC now, Micheal can ONLY code in BASIC.
Awesome story! Well-written also.
You are the engineer we all aspired to be. Though, you really are the chosen one.
Wish you the best!
Such fun for you and the author! I've never played the original game but now I wanna!
Cheers for this!
Thank you for sharing your story.
You're welcome!
I haven't heard the lore on this one, why is there interest in this?
Fantastic. Well done! For both the new game and the website article.
Cool! Was looking for something like this all through the 90s :)
Amazing read! Is it possible to do something like this but for wall street raider?
https://labs.ramp.com/rct
"claude code plays wall street raider" would be very very cool.
I would love to do this. I do plan to code a PowerBasic virtual machine in order to make the game cross platform which would allow for a future with Wall Street Raider Online because my true dream? I want to play it on my phone!
Super cool stuff! I love the idea of games being refurbished to the point that it can be kept, almost source original, and still played years down the line. For example, I love Another World for this, being just a bytecode blob where each port is just a VM (good writeup: https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons/index.html).
The Wall Street Raider is under active development, you’re releasing a clone under the same name?
https://www.roninsoft.com/wsraider.htm
I am working with Michael to remaster it. He transferred the domain name to me and I just redid the website. I'm not sure when the last time he updated Roninsoft website, but he has "retired" from working on WSR, although has been a huge help with the remaster. https://www.roninsoft.com/#:~:text=!!!%20Check%20out%20WallS...
> I'm not sure when the last time he updated Roninsoft website
Copyright © 2025 looks clear?
The game itself could be a good benchmark for AI agents.
AI can’t do impossible things yet, but we still can.
You're damn right we can.
"fits of rationality" is a great line.
Love it and fascinated to play the game.
How does the deal with the original author work with regard to the ownership of the copyright?
I mean, the article means passing the torch but how exactly is this assured in case the author dies and the estate holders don't release the copyright?
They spent so much time and effort to port this game to... Windows only?...
Congratulations Ben! The game sounds like a dangerous cult that I want no part of. But I've also done game ports recently and was curious - how much of the old codebase did you need to understand (and change!) in order to port it? And how much could you just wrap up / virtualise, and start building on top?
It is a cult and you should run while you still can. I would say to get to the point I'm so now I had to understand 40-50% of it. Let's face it, I work as a software developer and I don't remember half of the code in the project, maybe more, and I wrote it all! And this is way more complex than a business app. The reason I had to understand a lot is hard to explain but I will try... Basically a function might be called "FrontBuy". In this function contains all the math and all the decision tree logic and workflow for every possible situation to buy a stock. So now you say, let's replace all the Win32 dialogs with Electron front end. So what I did was I maintain essentially a high level GUI state manager in the Power Basic which controls the Electron app, using the C++ DLL as a FFI. That being said, you had to have some modicum of understanding of every function, maybe not all the math, but at the very least the workflow and structure of the PB code so that you don't break anything. And oh boy, did I break everything, many many times, to the chagrin of my beta testers.
oh this is an absolutely fascinating story!
I forgot to ask, do you have links to any of the Reddit threads? They’d be a fun read!
That is a really good idea. I totally forgot to include the link in that part of the story. I will definitely be making that change! Well, here is the one I think you are referring to: https://www.reddit.com/r/tycoon/s/bzjG709MLB
So, it sounds like you are in a perfect position to tell us whether Epstein's statement is right, THAT WALL STREET "makes trading way more complicated than it needs to be, because of all the money they make"
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wow, that was pain to read. I was expecting the technical side debugging, instead I get the article about literally nothing FULL of unverifiable claims and lore.
It is classic parrot slop.
If you could get an LLM to write the article, why not just get it to rewrite the code?
I'm not sure how feasible that would have been three years ago.
An Agent Team of Opus 4.6 should be able to reverse engineer the simulator in a day or two, instead of 3 years. But it wouldnt be so much fun I guess.
Good luck doing that without proper tests - I assume finance stuff is quite complicated and blanked porting with AI is insanely difficult, especially companies have failed in porting it by hand.
I feel like this is the sort of thing AI could do in 10 minutes. Did you try?
For the longest time I've had this feeling in the back of my head that most of the AI hype is from people who were bad at the job to begin with so they can't recognise limitations. This comment is a perfect example
Please do go ahead and report back to us in 10 minutes.
We’ll wait.
Happy to try, I don't have the original binary though. The author tells the story but I couldn't find a link to the old binary.
Seemed to take longer than 10 mins and you managed to do nothing so perhaps temper your blind confidence in this technology.